At the End of the World

"Yo, Bex! You keeping up back there?" Jaden cried, muffled behind the cloth of his mask.

The newbie loitered towards the rear of the party, dragging her feet through the bog. Typical. Because why would she think to follow in the others' footsteps? No, but they only had an extra eight years experience traversing the miasma. It was not a benign classroom, one wrong step and that would be it - 'there ain't no point in risking the lives of the adepts to get you out,' so the elders said. The survivors knew how to move, how to study the pools and the mud to find the footholds that would not sink them - or more fundamentally, knowing when it was safe to travel in the effluvium, and when it wasn't. After a windy day was usually fine - they got a lot of those up north.

The teen leading the party wasn't for waiting, especially not for stragglers. "We're on the clock here people! Next rain is due in six hours. If we ain't inside when it hits-"

"We know, Raven." Kieran rolled his eyes, wiping the droplets clouding the thick lenses of his goggles off on his glove. "We got time, keep your hair on."

"Yeah, Raven. Give her a break, it's her first time out." Laurie hung back with Jaden, waiting for the eleven year-old to catch up. Bex slipped in the mud, though miraculously didn't fall in. The two sighed, relieved. Raven scoffed. "Come on then, Bex! You got this!" They knew in places the mire would swallow her in up to her neck - no getting out of that. Still, it had to be done. A trial by fire as it were. They'd all done it at her age, now it was her turn. Little by little, she closed the distance.

Jaden smirked. "Not as easy as it looks, huh?"

She expected him to reach out and help her along those last few steps. He didn't, none of them did. They couldn't. She had to do it alone - she had to prove she could do it without a hand to hold. "No..." She gasped, holding her knees. "Sorry I'm so slow."

"That's okay. We all are when we start. You'll catch up." Laurie smacked her shoulder, perhaps a bit too hard, before rejoining the rest of the party up ahead. They were especially light on their feet, crossing the banks with the grace of any dancer.

Head tilted back, Raven leered through the black tint of her goggles, shrugging the black feathers woven all over her hood and shoulders. "Great, can we get moving now?" She turned back, surveying the landscape ahead of them for the best path to follow. "Any more delays and we'll leave you behind."

"Hey! Don't say that, she is your sister."

"... Half-sister." She cruelly snapped her gaze onto the child a moment before heading on.

"Don't listen to her, Bex. She's a bitch when she's hungry." Jaden knocked her shoulder.

"Yeah, I've noticed." She muttered. "But she's right, you're all too slow waiting for me." Worrying the leather of her gloves, she fixed her attention to the grey and black slick covering her waders, up to her waist. Looking back up at him, and admiring his outstanding physique, she wondered of a solution. "Maybe you could carry me?" Raven audibly scoffed at that.

"No can do. You gotta do this on your own. That was our only condition for letting you join, remember?"

Bex's expression sank again. "Right..."

"You can follow my footprints, kay?"

She did, grumbling under her breath as she trundled after him. Just how much longer should she kid herself that her feet weren't burning - wrapped up in wool to protect her skin should she pierce her boots on discarded scrap or sticks? Or that she was gasping for a drink?

They couldn't take breaks like that out in the open. It wasn't safe to remove masks in the miasma, not unless you minded your skin and eyes blistering, or developing ulcers across the throat and lungs. And anyway, if they had too many stops she'd end up needing the toilet - no chance of that happening anywhere outside civilisation.

How she wished to have stayed home at the bunker and simply wait for them to hurry back. But no - restless and stir-crazy, she'd begged to come along as she always did when the party headed out. Couldn't have believed her luck when they voted in her favour - with only her own sister rebuffing the idea. They'd all gone out their first time at her age, each started out bright-eyed and eager, and each returned broken, changed, older. Boring, as she'd described. That was before she had been old enough to hear the stories. Why uncle Rob never came home, why Dennis had taken a bottle of whiskey and left the bunker without a mask, why Lizzie screamed herself awake every night. 'Only the strongest survive,' that's what they'd say.

And it was the strongest that were supposed to provide for everyone. To go out and trade with other outposts - to come back with medicine, food, fuel, water tablets, anything they needed. The strongest - the grown-ups. And yet they'd been gone a year. 'They got caught off guard by a tidal wave,' some assumed. 'It was a cloudburst,' a few supposed. Everything from fog, to earthquakes, an explosion at the old power station, even other survivors assuming they were armed, or after raiding their bunker.

They were down to double-digits now. From over three thousand survivors. All kids, the elderly, or disabled. 'People are depending on us.' Raven kept that thought in mind - leading her crew, her party of misfits and delinquents turned champions, or would be if they returned with supplies.

So she led them on. Through the abyss, through the toxic hellscape that would not think twice of choking, drowning, or melting their flesh should they take that wrong step, or simply be caught off guard by freak weather.

And then by some miracle - their last landmark. What remained of a castle on the horizon. Not the castle itself they were after - since the caustic rain had long since made short work of the roof, and within a century the building itself would surely be little more than a fizzing grey mush. No, the castle was merely a facade - a beacon indicating the location of the bunker. The tunnels underneath modified into the last great stronghold of the north.

"There it is!" Kieran pointed it out, proud of himself for assuming to have seen it first.

"It's like the one from our storybooks..." Bex muttered to herself.

"And look-" Laurie noted, diverting their attention to the ruins at the base of the hill. "That's where they built the old vaults. We can make a quick stop there."

Everyone followed after them, rather than wait for Raven's say. She figured she'd pushed them too far already - going four hours without a break was a bit much. Bex tugged on her sleeve, much to her annoyance.

"What is this place?"

"Used to be called Edinburgh in the golden days." She pushed on, racing to get back to the head of the party.

***

They made for the infamous vaults of the South Bridge - perhaps an early attempt at underground living in the really old days. The party joked as they crossed the ruins of homes, roads and businesses to the entrance, sure it was their ancestors' mistakes on such constructions that inspired their grandparents to do better with the bunkers. Most of the tunnels had collapsed after the flood, yet enough dry ground inside remained for them to safely unmask, eat and drink in the glow of a hand-cranked lantern.

Jaden slumped himself down next to their leader, happy to be able to breathe again. "Nice one, Raven." Even without his thick waders and coat he still remained the largest of the group. He scratched at his shaven head.

"Yeah, got us all here in one piece!" Kieran added, wiping his goggles with a rag. They had been made extra thick to accommodate his lenses. The group had once been fortunate enough to have an optician living among them - it often made him wonder how other people with limited eyesight managed in such times. "Hey, Laurie! Aren't you on ration duty? Come on, we're starvin' here!"

"Give me a second." They dug through their pack - holding their braids to one side with their other hand. "Er... Here." Two full water bottles and a few tins of peaches in syrup. "Raven, heads up!" The eldest got a drink first, while the others worked on breaking into their remaining food supply.

"How we looking?"

"We've got enough to get us home." They slung the pack back over the shoulder, taking a swig of syrup as it was passed around. "Bex, come on, you don't want to miss out."

"Coming!" She'd gone away to relieve herself in privacy. As she headed back, she stopped a moment - her eye taken by a discarded toy on the floor. "Hey, check this out." She threw it to Kieran, since he was the only one with a free hand.

"Aw, cool - its Stormguard, from Multiverse Transformobots 3." He passed it on to Jaden, who lit up at the sight of it.

"Neat, my granddad had one of these in mint condition."

Kieran nodded. "And my nana. She bought the lot. Mum said nana got them to pay for her wedding if she ever had one, or a 'round the world trip."

"What's transformobots?" Bex sat cross-legged on the floor, leaning in eagerly.

"It's er... You know, a movie franchise from the old days. They were alien robots that could transform into spaceships and aeroplanes. Nana said the third film was definitely the best of the lot. They made a bunch of sequels and spinoffs, but they lost the magic of the original trilogy."

"Enough nerd talk." Raven scoffed. "She's got no idea what you're talking about."

"She knows what a movie is, we have film nights." He slumped, folding his arms as he passed the toy away for Laurie to inspect. "And it's not 'nerd' talk, its 'geek' talk - big difference."

Laurie snickered. "Spoken like a nerd. You've even got the glasses."

"Hey, short-sightedness has nothing to do with intellect." His freckled cheeks blushed - the unshaved half of his auburn curls hurriedly hiding his face.

"Yeah, and don't poke fun at geeks or nerds - they're probably the ones who'll get us out of this mess." Jaden widened his stance, sneering at them.

"That's right." Raven spoke up suddenly, staring at the toy that had been passed to her. "But you forget..." She peered down her painted nose at her party. "They're also the ones who didn't do anything to stop it." Her fingers gripped tighter around the robot. "You see this, Bex?" She spun it across the floor in her direction. "What do you think that's made of?"

"Um... Plastic?"

"Yep. Our grandparents were told these materials were bad when they were our age. They spent their early twenties preaching to the world that the planet was dying. They boycotted heavy industry, pollution, oil, mega corporations, the fishing industry, anyone, everyone. Chaining themselves to trees and railings as the authorities maced them, beat them, killed them sometimes. They made a fuss alright. But what do you suppose they did in their thirties?"

Her audience averted their gaze - all but Bex. "After a decade or two, they gave up. They'd done enough, they'd exhausted themselves, traded their youth for a pointless endeavour. No one had listened, why would they? So they went on with their lives. It was easier that way - to be led like sheep through the rat race - idyllic suburban living. Never wanting, never needing. 'Oh, it's not our fault that everything's packed in plastic - that's up to the retailers,' yet they'd happily part with their money. They became addicted to the influencers of their day, telling them what to buy, how to live, how to sleep, how to die. 'It's only one more car on the road. That dress will only last me a day, but I'll buy it anyway - how could I say no to such a cheap price?' They just kid themselves, day after day, until it didn't even cross their minds. Because there was always someone else to worry about the planet - someone else to blame for its destruction. And it was fine for them for a while... Until the summers brought devastating wildfires, the winters catastrophic floods. Species dropping out of existence. People choking to death in cities, or killing each other over oil and gas. In their sixties - no more freshwater. Boiling sewage for something to drink. Too crowded - people stacked on top of each other in tiny boxes, left to go mad and rot in their own filth. Still - they have their children to take care of it. They'll fix it, they'll bring back the good old days."

Her voice wavered, and she had to stop for a breath. "They didn't know how. They could have done it all had they started sooner. But the little problems became too big - a great snowball left to roll and grow, and grow, until nothing could stop it. No matter what they did, no matter how hard they tried, it would never be enough. Then the floods came. The last ice caps eating up the coasts, lowlands swamped by sand and silt. Except the water was different. The ice had acted as a prison for a super-caustic chemical soup from the primordial age. When it met the plastic in the sea, it produced gas, lacing every water molecule in the atmosphere with an acidity that can cut through skin, and bone, and metal, and rock. The weather is eating away at this world with every rain storm, every fog, every passing shower. Now, do any of you think you could solve that? Any bright ideas that could save this world and put it back the way it was?"

Of course they said nothing. Raven was always so dramatic, so depressing. She'd never had one positive thought in her life. Laurie frowned. "I think you're exaggerating a bit."

"And that-" She pointed at them. "That ladies, and gentlefolk, is exactly the type of attitude that got us into this mess in the first place. Those pathetic, obnoxious assholes that wouldn't listen in the first place. 'Because change is bad for business.'"

Jaden shook his head with a sigh. "You always get like this."

"We need to get moving anyway. Stop dwelling on what you can't control and get on with the mission. We still need those supplies, you know." Kieran shrugged her off, throwing his mask and hood back over his face as he followed Laurie out of the tunnels, and Jaden after him.

Bex lingered behind. She watched her sister's clenched fists tremble on her lap, her nostrils flaring, and any trace of warmth drain from her mottled tawny-beige skin.

They'd all seen it, they'd each watched it all unfold - with each tide, the sea brought in more silt and raised the land around their bunker entrance. The walls bulged, the pipes struggling under the weight of mud and acid. Every trip outside grew tougher - any path they defined would be gone on their next outing, and they saw fewer survivors out in the open. They lived it. And yet they still denied it - deciding not to think on it. But not Raven, never Raven. She knew with all her heart that they would be the last of the human race. So was there any point fighting it?

Bex took her hand, urging her to look up at her. "Well, I'm not giving up. We might never fix things. We might not be able to change the world back to how it was..." She forced a smile. "But we can make it a little better, one day at a time - for all that we have left. Come on, we're almost there now."

She fixed her mask to her face and waited for her sister. Raven hesitated, staring down at the toy in her hands - a relic of a different age. Leaving it behind where she had sat, she caught up with Bex and headed up to the exit.

In the light of late afternoon, the miasma was eerily beautiful. A lilac haze over the bog - with great clouds of it piercing the sky off in the distance. They could see the rain on the horizon - leaving behind waves of steam rolling off the valley. Then, sitting on the ruins of offices sticking up out of the mire - a bird.

"Look, a pigeon!" Bex pointed. Unable to contain her excitement, she hopped lightly between her feet, tugging on her sister's clothes.

Raven studied it, her sights fixed as she watched it preen itself. "That's actually called a collared dove... I didn't think there were any birds left so close to the coast."

"It's a sign then, don't you think? Maybe it means there's still safe places inland."

"Yeah..." She grinned, breathlessly. After it flew off, she turned to her sister again. "I think it's time you earned a nickname, Bex." She heard her gasp through her mask. "Dove. It sounds pretty apt, don't you think?"

"I love it."

"Come on then, let's catch up with the others and tell them the good news." She took her hand, carrying on ahead to where their friends stood waiting.